WHAT IS GENOCIDE?

WHAT IS GENOCIDE?

AN EVOLVING INTERNATIONAL FRAMEWORK

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The term “genocide” was created during the Holocaust and declared an international crime in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The Convention defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such:
a. Killing members of the group;
b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring
about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The “intent to destroy” particular groups is unique to the definition of genocide. A closely related category of international law—“crimes against humanity”—is defined as widespread or systematic attacks against civilians.
This timeline traces the development of the term “genocide” and its codification into international law.
1944
THE CRIME IS NAMED
Before 1944, no term existed to describe a coordinated assault on civilian populations. That year, Raphael Lemkin introduced the term “genocide” to give the crime a name. Lemkin was a Polish-Jewish legal scholar who had fled Nazi-occupied Poland and arrived in the United States in 1941.

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